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Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

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Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#281

Post by berkes »

Carpetsmoker wrote: post #129
bad_user wrote: post #115

I have my own self-hosted Matomo instance [1]. Via Docker & docker-compose it's quite easy to install and keep up to date and Matomo is open source, well maintained, very well behaved and pretty hands off. And I configured it on my websites with cookies turned off [2] and with IP anonymization [3]. In such an instance you don't need consent, or even a cookie banner, because you're not dropping cookies, or collecting…

> And I disagree with another commenter here saying Analytics is just for vanity. That's not true — even for a personal blog analytics are useful to see which articles are still being visited and thus need to be kept up to date, or in case content is deprecated, the least you could do is to put up a warning. Some examples: I maintained a Vim ChangeLog for a while (which is quite some work), and turned out no one was…

Three times I found out that a blog post of mine was on the HN frontpage, because my matomo was going bonkers. This might count as "vanity metrics", but it taught me, above all, how valuable "being here" is. It has a clear and undeniable "inkstain" effect: where other blogs, news outlets and so on follow HN. HN goes hand-in-hand with reddit, for my niche, though.

My wife as several e-commerce and our weekly "walking through the matomo screens over a glass of wine" has learned us that there are important niches. And what those niches are (vegan smartphone covers, Fairphone flip-cases, fairtrade and environmental-friendly mouthmasks).

Sure, you also need customer interviews and old-fashioned market-research, but your webapp and website is telling you a lot about your users.

And sure, often, you don't need any metrics. But just like Carpetsmoker above, I see a lot of value in metrics. Just don't fall in the trap to collect "you-never-know" metrics: that is privacy-invading, a liability and requires a scale beyond anything you really need. You don't need data-lake, distributed ETL processes and whatnot to find out that there are products in your webshop selling better than others because you are doing well on natural searches for that product.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#283

Post by hombre_fatal »

bscphil wrote: post #276
bad_user wrote: post #115

I have my own self-hosted Matomo instance [1]. Via Docker & docker-compose it's quite easy to install and keep up to date and Matomo is open source, well maintained, very well behaved and pretty hands off. And I configured it on my websites with cookies turned off [2] and with IP anonymization [3]. In such an instance you don't need consent, or even a cookie banner, because you're not dropping cookies, or collecting…

> And I disagree with another commenter here saying Analytics is just for vanity. That's not true — even for a personal blog analytics are useful to see which articles are still being visited and thus need to be kept up to date, or in case content is deprecated, the least you could do is to put up a warning. I mean, I'm not making the argument that analytics are useless, but this seems like the worst possible example…

For a lot or maybe even most people, all of that entails some mix of: possibly having to set up server logs in the first place, redirecting them somewhere for analysis and possibly archival, having access to a server in the first place, hooking up the analytics apparatus to consume the logs yet also be able to serve a dashboard, setup yet another moving part, finally get around to that "TODO: setup real logging instead of println()" issue, etc.

There's lots of take for granted there. It's no wonder copy and pasting a one-liner caught on.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#284

Post by mikemotherwell »

jwr wrote: post #28

I turned off Google Analytics, because I realized that it doesn't actually report any useful or actionable data, just vanity metrics, and many of them of dubious quality. I run a SaaS and what matters for me is paid subscriptions. "Visits" (even if by humans, which is hard to tell) really do not matter much. Yes, I do want to increase conversion rates, and run bandit experiments, but I'm better off doing that myself.…

Depends how big you plan on getting. Be infinitely easier to hire someone who knows how to use GA to make decisions, and historical data will be useful at that point.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#285

Post by michaelbrooks »

boromi wrote: post #180
bad_user wrote: post #115

I have my own self-hosted Matomo instance [1]. Via Docker & docker-compose it's quite easy to install and keep up to date and Matomo is open source, well maintained, very well behaved and pretty hands off. And I configured it on my websites with cookies turned off [2] and with IP anonymization [3]. In such an instance you don't need consent, or even a cookie banner, because you're not dropping cookies, or collecting…

How do you actually host this? Do I need a VPS or is more of like a Heroki thing?

I managed to host it fairly easily using Digital Ocean on a $5 droplet.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#286

Post by JackWritesCode »

justinclift wrote: post #277
JackWritesCode wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting take. For every star we had on GitHub we did 21 cents in monthly revenue for (around $1300). We needed to turn Fathom into a viable competitor to Google Analytics. We can't do that if we are working a few hours a week on it, we needed to be full time. Here's a comparison I've always looked at. Here are 2 solid database tools: Table Plus - https://tableplus.com/ SQLite Browser - https://sqlitebrowser.org/…

> For every star we had on GitHub we did 21 cents in monthly revenue ... Who gives a crap? You guys started out as OSS and said it would continue to be. That turned out to be bullcrap, just looking for exposure. > I have used both but Table Plus is 10000x better and more popular. sigh Table Plus supports many different types of database. If people are looking for a macOS specific solution that does that, Table Plus m…

We are 2 indie developers trying to build a sustainable business. We are trying to compete against Google. The idea that the open-source package is responsible for our success is ludicrous. Our success came from thousands of hours of work. You’ll believe the narrative you choose. You’re entitled to that. We will always be “liars” to you because we chose to spend our time building up the paid service. You feel like we should open source all of our code, that’s fine. This conversation isn’t productive, and you seem spiteful, so I’m retiring. And I hadn’t realized that you were the creator of DB browser, that was just a recent example I’d been discussing with friends. Good luck with your chosen path. Please hug your family and take some time to relax.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#287

Post by XCSme »

Diesel555 wrote: post #267
jbrooksuk wrote: post #42

I've been happily using Fathom Analytics: https://usefathom.com and I have zero complaints. No tracking. Privacy focused. Lightweight. You embed from your own domain. They even do site monitoring now!

I run fathom self hosted. I don’t love it and am looking for an alternative. But this is because they don’t update the self hosted version. I get it that I’m asking for a free service, I just kind of wish they never offered it if they were going to ditch it. I don’t make money off my sites. I wish they had a less than X income version to self host. Oh well. If you are making money and willing to pay I have a feeling…

You can check out https://usertrack.net, but it's currently $99/life. I do plan to add a free version with some limited features (no heatmaps, no session recordings, no multi-domain, etc.), but the free version should be anyway better than most of the alternatives (fast interface, segments, quick user filtering, easy to install).

If you want, you can contact me on Twitter to tell me what the free version should contain for you to consider using it, or if the current price for the lifetime version is too high for you.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#288

Post by XCSme »

Ataraxy wrote: post #271

All of these web tracker alternatives but what I've really been itching for is a very low barrier to entry, no hassle to scale, easy/fast to query adhoc event tracker. Something like a self hosted amplitude or keen.

Hmm, depends on what you mean by "easy/fast to query". Is something with a GraphQL API easy/fast to query? Or should it have some UI to do it?

I wonder if it's easy to just send events to something like Firebase and then query that DB.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#289

Post by JackWritesCode »

FalconSensei wrote: post #160
JackWritesCode wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a huge shift happening. People are realizing that Google Analytics isn’t “free”. You’re sending data to a company that has a huge amount of privacy scandals. We have lots of agencies who use us, and their clients may differ from yours, but here’s what’s helped them: https://usefathom.com/blog/switch

> There’s a huge shift happening. People are realizing that Google Analytics isn’t “free”. Just be aware that, while that is true for HN, and some subreddits, that still doesn't apply to most people. It's the same as saying, based on comments on HN, that people are moving away from Chrome when its market share is not going down.

I mean outside of HN :) HN makes up < 1% of our customers

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#290

Post by JackWritesCode »

zoomablemind wrote: post #211
JackWritesCode wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GA and AWStats are both awful products for a lot of people. For us, we check out Fathom dashboard daily to see referrers and popular content. And vitality (right now we can see a ton of traffic coming from HN). When I used GA, I never checked it.

> GA and AWStats are both awful products for a lot of people. Just wonder, what's awful about AWStats? Sure it's dated, and "analog" in a way that it's log-based, not JS. But it does not send the tracking to the third party, can be used offline.

I don’t believe it’s compliant with various regulations. I haven’t looked in-depth
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